How to Find Good Walking Tours
Lyon in December, during my birthday trip. We walked all over this city, again and again. Lyon, France. December 15, 2019.
I’ve loved walking tours since I got hooked on taking one a month while I lived in London. I got a great education on the city, its background, its neighborhoods, and its people. And I’d often use the tours to find places and things that deserved a deeper second visit.
I define a walking tour as a tour of an area on foot (obviously) that focuses on a particular slice of history, a specific personality or set of characters, or the evolution of a neighborhood.
You can take tours that walk you through specific historical sites—tours dedicated to churches and castles and the like—though I see these as somewhat different and often as very much dictated by the organization that operates the site (and not by an independent tour operator or guide). Also, you can get guided hikes in rural areas, but these tours function more as ways to get exercise while experiencing and learning about nature. (Though a city or area may have some nature, I think you can grasp the difference.)
Of course, not all locations make for viable walking-tour opportunities. Cities and concentrated geographies are better locations for walking tours than more spread-out areas, for example. When we visited Provence, we took a fantastic walking tour in Aix-en-Provence—and we didn’t even bother looking for a walking tour in the Luberon.
If you find yourself in a good walking-tour spot, you’ll discover it a challenge to find a good one. Though walking tours are routine when you take a trip organized by a tour operator—such as voyages via cruise ships and tour-bus jaunts across geographies—you must proactively seek out walking tours when traveling solo. And where do you look? After all, walking tours rarely make it into the standard guidebooks, unlike an area’s museums and main tourist attractions.
The Best Destinations for Walking Tours
If you love culture and history, like I do, you’ll have a good number of small and large cities and villages on your must-travel list. As much as I love hiking in rural areas and lounging on beaches, I feel most alive and engaged when walking for hours at a time in an urban setting—walking tour or no walking tour.
The best areas for walking tours have minimal space between key sites. Though you could plan a walking tour in a more distributed area, the easier option for touring between widespread sites is via a dedicated bus. (We couldn’t have as efficiently and easily have visited Gruyeres and done a chocolate tour of Switzerland on foot.) And don’t look for walking tours in the middle of nowhere, unless you aim for a hike more than a cultural experience.
Not all cities will have great walking tour opportunities, though. Even many cities don’t have the right setups for walking tours. If the city developed around the automobile—like Houston, where I lived for many years—places of interest have developed at such a distance from each other that you can’t see much on foot in a reasonable amount of time.
Further, some cities tear down buildings and even neighborhoods and regions to rebuild every few years—a definite tendency in the United States. These cities don’t have much of historical interest to visit, even in denser urban areas.
And some cities have had to rebuild in recent years due to war or other catastrophes. For example, Europe has many cities that the locals needed to rebuild after World War Two—and the rebuilding needed to happen with minimal budget, for obvious reasons. The historical sites got wiped away, people developed new structures with the car in mind (making them less pleasantly walkable), and, in many cases, the resulting architecture doesn’t have a lot going for it. (Unless, that is, you study après-guerre buildings and city planning.)
Finding Good Walking Tours
If you visit a city or town that seems perfect for walking tours, where do you find a good walking tour to take?
Tourist offices in a region or city will often have walking tours on offer or to recommend. I’ve found these tours hit-or-miss. While we had a great walking tour provided through the Aix-in-Provence tourist office—the guide brought the city to life in a way that three days of staying there hadn’t yet managed to do—we had a very lackluster and uninspiring walking tour provided by the Lyon tourist office.
In addition to the city’s main tourist office, sites like AirBNB and Tripadvisor now offer “experiences” though which you can book tours, including walking tours. Arnaud’s sister Léo, who guides tours in Paris and Normandy, recommended the sites Like a Local, Viator, and Get Your Guide for resourcing tour guides in your planned destination. (She especially praised Like a Local for having high quality customer service and good treatment for guides who offer their services on the site as well, so I’d recommend checking out that resource first when researching walking tours.)
We had our first experience with AirBNB’s experiences in Lyon and we had mixed results. One of the positive results came through meeting a guide named Nicolas, who had truly fantastic energy and insights. For this article, I reached out to Nicolas for his advice on how to find the best tours and how to assess a publicized tour for its quality ahead of booking. He and his sister, who operate a tour-guide company called Vivre à la Lyonnaise, have a lot of experience, so I figured he’d know.
Nicolas defined “quality” when it comes to a walking tour as a tour that is “tailored, easy-access, but thorough.” He said that if your definition of of a good walking tour matches his, “it is much more interesting to turn to smaller agencies that have their own touch and vision about their city and place.”
When it comes to evaluating a possible tour or tour guide, Nicolas said to “look out not just for those who pretend to take you ‘off the beaten track,’ because that’s what we all aim to do, but those who offer themselves as well as part of the experience.”
Nicolas suggested you review the tour information with the following questions in mind: Who specifically will take me on this tour? What interests this person? Why did he or she decide to guide walking tours? How did the guide or the agency come up with the idea for this tour, and what influenced the tour’s creation?
Signing up with a tour that doesn’t tell you about your guide means taking a big risk with your time and money.
Also, Nicolas suggested that people looking for a quality walking tour should assess whether the listed tour offers to tell a story connecting historical events. “How does the person or agency tell about the tour?” Nicolas said. “Does the tour tell a story and provide a timeline that it plans to follow?”
In short, a tour that sounds generic and that tells you nothing about the person who will guide it has a high probability for disappointing you. Look for well-crafted tours with a clear vision for the tour’s story and purpose—and with a clear picture and description of the person who will lead it.
Side note: Love guided tours as much as I do, walking and otherwise? Read my article with my four top tips for sourcing the best guides during your travels.
Safety on Walking Tours
Ne’er-do-wells can spot tourists in groups more easily than they can a solo tourist. (However, if you walk around with a huge backpack and a camera around your neck, pulling out maps and guidebooks at each corner, staring at buildings and major and minor attractions gape-mouthed, you’ve made yourself a mark no matter how many people you have walking with you.)
As walking tours make travelers easier marks for people with ill intentions, people in a walking tour and people who have just exited a walking tour should take a few extra precautions:
Keep your wallet and your passport (if you have it on you) somewhere secure and not easily accessed by quick fingers.
Keep your bags close to your body and, if possible, strap them across your chest or torso so that you have their openings and access points in your vision and peripheral vision.
When you leave the group—whether at the end of the tour or during the tour for a pit stop or quick detour—continue to keep your belongings secured and stay in well-lighted and trafficked places, in case someone has singled you out as a post-tour target.
Likely, nothing will happen to you while traveling. Often, people are most at risk in their home environments, where they let their guards down. Don’t feel fearful—yet don’t get lazy on vigilance, either.
Don’t Dismiss Tours on Travel
While traveling with friends, I’ve had several people feel “above” taking tours, disliking the touristy feel of organized, guided programming and believing it better to explore independently.
Though I’ve had my own cringeworthy moments feeling like a megatourist while on walking tours, a good guided tour—especially one that connects you with your guide, per Nicolas’s points above—will never make you feel like a tourist. Instead, a quality walking tour will make you feel like you’ve found an insightful, educated friend to take you around and enlighten you on the coolest things about a place.
Trust me: No amount of wandering around on your own, even with a great guidebook, will give you the same depth of insight into a location or the same depth of fun as a good walking tour. If you haven’t tried a walking tour, I highly recommend you follow Nicolas’s guidance, find a good tour to take, and go.
And if you’d like a little more of my guidance on trip planning, read my article sharing my hard-won tips and tricks on travel planning.